Conferencing environments, such as conference rooms, boardrooms, video conferencing applications, and the like, can involve the use of microphones for capturing sound from various audio sources active in such environments. Such audio sources may include humans speaking, for example. The captured sound may be disseminated to a local audience in the environment through amplified speakers (for sound reinforcement), or to others remote from the environment (such as via a telecast and/or a webcast).
Traditional microphones typically have fixed polar patterns and few manually selectable settings. To capture sound in a conferencing environment, many traditional microphones are often used at once to capture the audio sources within the environment. However, traditional microphones tend to capture unwanted audio as well, such as room noise, echoes, and other undesirable audio elements. The capturing of these unwanted noises is exacerbated by the use of many microphones.
Array microphones provide benefits in that they have steerable coverage or pick up patterns, which allow the microphones to focus on the desired audio sources and reject unwanted sounds such as room noise. The ability to steer audio pick up patterns provides the benefit of being able to be less precise in microphone placement, and in this way, array microphones are more forgiving. Moreover, array microphones provide the ability to pick up multiple audio sources with one array microphone or unit, again due to the ability to steer the pickup patterns.
However, array microphones have certain shortcomings, including the fact that they are typically relatively larger than traditional microphones, and their fixed size often limits where they can be placed in an environment. Moreover, when larger numbers of array microphones are used, the microphone elements of onearray microphone do not work in conjunction with the microphone elements of another array microphone. Systems of array microphones can often be difficult to configure properly. Also, array microphones are usually significantly more costly than traditional microphones. Given these shortcomings, array microphones are usually custom fit to their application, causing them to be primarily used in large scale, highly customized, and costly installations.
Accordingly, there is an opportunity for systems that address these concerns. More particularly, there is an opportunity for modular systems including an array microphone module that is easily scalable, flexible in mounting position, and self configuring to allow the system to optimally detect sounds from an audio source, e.g., a human speaker, and reject unwanted noise and reflections.